April 7, 2017
With the widespread of fake news online it becomes extremely hard to distinguish between fact and fiction. Thousands of new articles are being published every single minute online. The veracity and truthfulness of this content is not readily known. Readers have to dig deeper and further investigate contextual elements, among other things, to determine whether a particular news story or a certain claim is factual or not. That’s why last month Google in partnership with Jigsaw released a new feature in Google News that allows readers to view whether the content they are reading has been fact checked by news publishers and fact-checking organizations. A fact-checked news item in Google News has an attached ‘Fact Check’ tag.

Today, Google announced that the ‘Fact Check’ feature is now available not only in Google News but also in Google Search and in all languages. ‘ when you conduct a search on Google that returns an authoritative result containing fact checks for one or more public claims, you will see that information clearly on the search results page. The snippet will display information on the claim, who made the claim, and the fact check of that particular claim.’ These fact checks are not Google’s; they are provided by content publishers and in some cases the same claim might be fact checked by more than a publisher. Generally, ‘If a site has fact checked a claim related to your search, you might see a search result with a box that tells you:The claim being checked, who made the claim, the name of the publisher doing the fact check, and a summary of the publisher’s fact check’.